


Miraculous RPG

by MiraculousMage



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - MMO, Alternate Universe - RPG, Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-05-31 18:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6481270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraculousMage/pseuds/MiraculousMage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(AU) Marinette thinks roleplaying games aren't for her, but when she finds out Adrien plays the new deep-immersion VRMMO "Miraculous RPG," she decides checking it out can't be that bad of an idea. Things go off the rails of her plans rather quickly, however, and she gets more into character than she could have ever expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Downloading...

Marinette sighs as she waits for school to start. She had gotten here on time, her homework was done, nothing truly unlucky had happened... and she realizes how boring it is. Looking over to her best friend Alya, she realizes the girl is intensely focused on her smartphone as she types something. "What are you working on there, Alya?"

Alya looks slightly startled as she looks between Marinette and her phone, and then she looks proud as she holds it up for her to see. "Oh, I'm setting up the website for my Miraculous Guild."

Marinette's confused, to say the least. "Your what?"

Alya giggles as she goes back to her work. "My guild! You know, in roleplaying games? I've been really into Miraculous RPG lately."

Marinette leans over to get a look at the complicated coding her friend is doing as she talks. "I mostly play action games, you know that. I don't have time to get sucked into a virtual world."

Alya rolls her eyes as she types, apparently accustomed enough to it to not look directly at her work. "You haven't been paying attention, huh? The new VRCocoon lets you play while you're asleep, so it's really popular. Miraculous is really good! I'll let you be my underling when you join."

The idea of playing in her sleep does seem intriguing, especially since she's so busy during the day with school and fashion design. She suddenly remembers exactly how much a deep-immersion virtual reality system would cost. "I'll have to decline, Alya. I'm saving my money for something else." This is technically true; her budget is meant entirely for fashion, even if she’s not sure exactly what she’ll be spending it on during any given day.

Alya looks sad, but Marinette knows a mischievous glint in someone's eye when she sees it. Even as she speaks, she's trying not to smirk. "Alright, but let me know if something... _Miraculous_ happens to change your mind!"

Marinette lets out a groan even before the pun comes. "Alyaaaa-"

A deeper voice cuts her off, and Marinette is left with her voice caught in her throat as she sees her favorite gorgeous blond model standing beside her. "Are you guys talking about Miraculous?"

Marinette finds her head swiveling between Adrien and Alya as they talk, with her in-between them. Alya can barely contain a grin at the situation. "Sure are! How's your guild doing, Adrien?"

Adrien rolls his eyes as he drops his bag with a loud thud onto his desk. "Ugh, don't remind me. I have so much to do in that game tonight. It keeps my father happy though." He turns to look at her in the eyes, and she can feel all of her blood rushing to her head. "Too bad you're not playing anytime soon, Marinette, I could use more actual friends online."

Marinette feels her stomach twist itself into a knot. He had heard her say she wasn't interested in playing the game he plays. Changing her mind now would be too suspicious. She tries to change the subject, if even a little bit, just to get her mind off of disappointing the sun of her life. "H-How come your father's happy with you playing a game?"

Adrien's eyebrows rise in surprise, and he chuckles a bit at the question. "Oh, you didn't know? He's the biggest shareholder in VRCocoon. I don't know what possessed him to help fund it, but nowadays I work as one of the company faces, so I'm contractually obligated to play. I'll show you some shots of me in Miraculous sometime! It's so photorealistic, it looks just like the real me!"

Her brain bursts at the idea that there were photos of Adrien she had never seen, and her words come out in a jumbled mess while she's still putting it back together. "Like that I'd! I mean, I'd that like! Uh..."

He smiles at her, and she shuts up before she ever reassembles the sentence into a proper format. She just lets a smile and a nod do the work for her. As he turns around to get his books out for class, she keeps nodding, and Alya has to clamp her head in her hands just to get the nodding to stop.

Marinette thinks about how much money she currently has saved up. A VRCocoon can't be _that_ expensive... right?

* * *

 Marinette holds a funeral for her bank account after school. It's nothing fancy, especially since she no longer has the money to afford a proper burial. She'll be able to resurrect it, probably, eventually. She'll work shifts at the bakery, start an online store, donate blood, sell her kidney, maybe even work for Chloe- no, that'd be too far. Other than that, she's willing to do almost anything at all.

It will all be worth it if she can befriend Adrien in the game.

She reads up on some general details in advance. The VRCocoon taps into your subconscious in order to present the game to you while you're asleep, and then when you wake up in the morning, you remember it like you would a dream. Due to the nature of it, the personality you have inside the game might not be the same as the one you have in reality, due to a lower state of consciousness. Recording software allows you to record moments and upload them so you can look them over during the day if you really want to. How this works is beyond her, and she just chalks it up to magic.

As for Miraculous RPG, it is a game set in a fantasy world, the plot of which involves magical items called Miraculous. There are multiple ways to advance your character, either through combat or "roleplaying" tasks such as crafting. The box shows pictures of typical fantasy characters, and it's kind of awkward for her how real they look. She examines each of them in turn, giving special care to the fabrics, but she realizes with a start that the knight in shining armor looks just like Adrien.

She decides to sleep early that night. She's too distracted to work on her designs, and she needs to do character creation first. On future nights, she will not go to bed this early, she tells herself. She has most of it set up already, the helmet lyng on her bed, waiting to be turned on so that it can lull her to dream-land.

She climbs into bed, making sure to turn out her lights, and starts fiddling with the helmet. "Okay, just... have to set this up here, put this on, and... go to sleep. I guess."

As her eyes adjust to the screen, asking her if she really wants to go to sleep and enter Miraculous RPG, she wonders if maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Things could go very wrong. Maybe this will be like all those anime where people get trapped in virtual reality forever. The music that starts playing in her ear, however, is certainly relaxing, and her eyes feel so very heavy. Thoughts of Adrien in shining armor drift into her mind again, and she smiles to herself. Trying just this once isn't going to hurt... right?


	2. Creation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After getting her hands on a VRCocoon and going to sleep with it, Marinette gets lost in character creation.

Marinette's eyes fly open, and she realizes with a start that she's floating weightlessly somewhere that is most definitely not her bed. Her hair whips every which way as she takes in her new surroundings, hoping to find some clue of what's going on. There are stars in every direction, though she's not sure which way could be considered up without solid ground beneath her. They dot the black sphere around her, as if she's in the endless void of space, but many of them are moving slowly and erratically. She takes in a breath to calm herself, and it surprises her that she's capable of such an act. One of the small stars passes by her face lazily, and after a moment's hesitation, she reaches out a hand towards it. It feels warm to the touch, and as it floats around the obstacle she placed in its way, she fondly recalls a summer picnic she went on with her family, surrounded by fireflies.

She blinks, and a mirror manages to appear in front of her in the time that her eyes were closed. She blinks a few more times, wondering if more will appear if she does that, but the mirror remains her sole companion in the void. She sees no reflection of herself, but the stars are reflected in the glass, so she's certain that it must be a mirror. She examines the rest its golden frame, now having something other than the stars to stare at. It seems to have several creatures carved into it, and her eyes flit from piece to piece. There's a peacock in flight, a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, a fox hiding behind its own tail, a turtle seemingly carrying the mirror on its back, and most oddly, a cat chasing a ladybug on the top of the frame. 

She tries to move closer to the glass, first by walking on nothing, and then by swimming through it, but her attempts seem as fruitless as her love life. After a moment, she hears a low hum, and the stars seem to pulse. The golden frame shines a bit brighter than before, and she realizes the mirror is approaching her, the star patterns shifting as it gets closer. It doesn't stop as it gets within an inch of her, and she closes her eyes to prepare for impact. A moment later, and she feels pinpricks inside her head, as if caterpillars are crawling around on her brain. She isn't sure exactly how long it lasts, but when it ends, she opens her eyes again. The mirror is now behind her, and she turns to see what's on the other side of the looking glass.

Her breath catches as she realizes that the mirror now holds an image of Marinette... a very naked Marinette. She instinctively covers herself, shame heating her face, and it takes her a moment to remember that no one is watching her except for herself. She relaxes for a moment, and then examines her reflection. It strikes her that her body is lacking details she knows are there in reality. The image feels more like a doll of herself than a true reflection, and as she moves her head closer to her reflection, she finds the details that are there aren't quite the same either.

A feminine voice speaks to her, and she flinches at the suddenness of it. "The image before you is taken from your brain's sense of self." The voice feels... familiar. She can't place it, but the nearly motherly tones make her feel at home in this endless void, despite the nearly robotic vocabulary. "It may not match the "you" in reality, but we believe it will be close enough. At this time, you may freely modify your dream self's body, as well as look at preset alterations, such as the fantasy races that exist in Miraculous." 

She finally remembers the VRCocoon she had worn to bed. A navigation menu appears on the mirror's surface, causing ripples as if emerging from a pond. Marinette wonders for a moment exactly how to navigate it, looking between different options available to her, when it responds to her thoughts and moves. She can find so many different options, able to change everything from the color of her individual hairs to the size, shape, and color of birthmarks. She giggles at the appearance of the doll when she switches it to one of the many male presets, and quickly figures out the screenshot function. She's sure that at the very least, she's just found a great way to make art references. She decides to show this to Nathanael later, after she's figured out a way to tell Alya and Adrien that she has the game.

The racial presets turn out to be entertaining as well. They appear to largely be fantasy classics, and she finds herself in awe of Elven Marinette, snickering at Dwarven Marinette, and checking out her own tail as Catfolk Marinette. She briefly wonders what Adrien would think of her with cat ears, and she blushes as she screenshots that version of herself as well. She'll have to make sure to crop the photo, as even in her dreams she isn't quite _that_ bold.

In the end, she returns to the base body the game gave her, throwing away what feels like hours of alterations. She looks at the reflection of regular Marinette for a moment, and then alters the hair and eyes to be a bit brighter than they could possibly be in reality. She also makes her body a bit more toned, as she hasn't helped out in the bakery in a while despite still eating her family's cooking. She takes a look at her new reflection as a whole, and it makes her feel cool and confident to see this variant Marinette in the mirror. She decides to take a few screenshots of herself posing before she moves on to the next part of character creation, telling herself that there's nothing wrong with some self-admiration.

The Voice gives her an explanation about how the statistics in the game work. Her head swims as she realizes exactly how many there are. She's freely allowed to distribute her stat-points as she wishes, and the game tells her about several recommended sets based on what sort of goals she has. At the end of the explanation, her mind snaps back into focus when she hears the word Luck.

"The Luck stat governs many things, but how it works is a secret. If you dare take a chance on having high luck, you may find yourself rewarded!"

Marinette thinks to how unlucky she normally is in life. Just that morning, a dropped yarn ball had transformed her room into a Rube Goldberg machine of utter destruction. "I can use all the luck I can get," she mutters to the void, and decreases all of her other stats to the bare minimum while she maximizes her luck stat. "I can raise everything else later through hard work... that's how all these games go."

After she confirms that yes, she really does want to go through with this, the doll is suddenly clothed in a gorgeous dress that reminds her of a villager's clothing. The detail and stitchwork fascinate her for a moment before she realizes she can change the clothing as she wishes, and even swap out pieces. She's sorely tempted to play dress-up doll until it's time to wake up for school, but she promised herself she'd at least make it into the game before that happened.

In the end, she decides on a set of clothes that make her think of a pirate. From her research, she knows there's a deeply involved crafting system in-game, so she'll just make her own later. What she assumes is the final prompt emerges from the mirror, asking for the name she will be known by in this new world. She panics for a moment, trying to decide on a good fantasy name for herself, when her eyes settle on the golden ladybug on the mirror frame. Ladybugs were lucky, right? Of course that'd be a perfect name for someone who bet everything on luck.   
She thinks the word "Coccinelle" repeatedly in her head, until the game responds. The name "COCCINELLE" appears in the mirror, only for a giant red X to appear over it. Marinette sighs to herself- of course someone had taken that, she surely wasn't the first person to take their name from the first thing they set their eyes on at the time. "...Okay, how about the English... Ladybug!" LADYBUG appears in large letters, as well as a large green circle. Her sigh this time is of relief. "Ladybug... I'm Ladybug now."

The Voice echoes through the space one more time, and she realizes that each of the stars are pulsing once more. With each pulse, they get brighter and larger. "Thank you very much for your input. Now, it's time to make your dreams come true, Ladybug!" The stars become so bright that she can't see anything, and as she closes her eyes to shield herself from the all-enveloping light, she can't help but feel excited for the part that comes next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time, on Miraculous RPG: Ladybug enters the world of Miraculous! Will she be able to survive an encounter with the local fauna?

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this AU for a while, because I figured an MMO AU would be a perfect way to keep the four-person love square dynamic while changing the context. I really look forward to all of the other scenes I've typed out outlines for! If this AU inspires you in any way, let me know, I'd love to hear about your ideas!


End file.
